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The Fish Child is an adaptation of the director’s own novel of the
same title. The novel is told from the point of view of a dog. We have had
dog-narrators before, in the wonderful novel Flush (1924),
by Virginia Woolf, and
also in film, in Jean-Luc Godard’s latest experimental feature, Goodbye to Language (2014). In Puenzo’s book, ‘Serafín’ the dog is
not just a gimmick, because he develops and changes throughout the story like
the other characters. However, in the last few chapters of the novel, the
narrator begins to slip into describing the thoughts of the characters
--impossible for a dog, no matter how strong its bond to humans may be. The
book couldn’t sustain the unified voice, but the film was unburdened by that
problem. The lush but raw visuals, and a rhythm running-on-all-fours, bring
cohesion to the story.

The
Fish Child is about the awkward young white woman Lala, living a life of
idleness in a wealthy suburb of Buenos Aires, and her falling in love with the Guaraní indian live-in-servant Guayi, a kind young woman shackled by a
traumatic event. In the film, told through conventional-objective camera,
‘Serafín’ the dog plays a very small part in a a sweeping story of all-consuming love,
messy and irresponsible teenage needs and resolutions, and the demands made by
a sickened world. In this lesbian
thriller-romance, the world is less plagued by homophobia than by racism, by
the exploitation of women, and by the omnipresent class privilege. Can we dare
to hope for connection, support, and honesty, or is that a murky fairy tale?